Operationalizing Collective Outcomes: Lessons Learned and Best Practices from and for Country Implementation

The volume, cost and length of humanitarian assistance provision over the past ten years has grown dramatically, in large part due to the protracted nature of crises. Inter-agency humanitarian plans now last an average of seven years and the resource requirements of plans has increased nearly 400 per cent in the last decade.1 At the same time, the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, set out a new ambition: to not just meet needs, but to reduce risk, vulnerability and overall levels of need, providing a reference frame for both humanitarian and development actors to contribute to the common vision of a future in which no one is left behind.

Against this backdrop, the Secretary-General and eight UN Principles together with World Bank and IOM endorsed a Commitment to Action during the World Humanitarian Summit in which they agreed to implement a “New Way of Working” that meets people’s immediate humanitarian needs while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability by working towards collective outcomes across silos, over multiple years, based on the comparative advantage of a diverse range of actors, including those outside the UN system. Working towards collective outcomes is the way forward on how to ensure effective and efficient humanitarian-development and peace collaboration.

In 2017, the Secretary-General and the UN renewed his commitment towards the New Way of Working by establishing a Joint Steering Committee to advance Humanitarian and Development Collaboration (JSC) to promote greater coherence of humanitarian and development action in crises and transitions to long-term sustainable development.

Purpose of this Document

This document is designed to guide country leadership on how to articulate and operationalize collective outcomes in a country in line with the New Way of Working (NWOW)2. The document summarizes lessons learned and good practices observed in several countries that have started to work towards collective outcomes. These lessons and practices have been identified through previous field missions to the seven priority countries of the of the Joint Steering Committee: Burkina Faso, Chad, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Somalia, Niger and Nigeria.3 These observations stem from various regional and global workshops focused on identifying best practices with governments, donors, NGOs and all relevant stakeholders, from phone interviews with respective Resident Coordinators and UN leadership in country, and other relevant bodies advancing humanitarian-development collaboration.